Events

Black Georgics

During his fellowship, Gay is working on a kind of response, or update, to Virgil’s Georgics. He hopes to understand something about our relationship(s) to the land—especially as it relates to race—particularly, perhaps, in the Anthropocene.

Fellows' Presentation

Sarah Howe RI '16 wrote a poem dedicated to physicist Stephen Hawking for UK National Poetry Day—one inspired by her love of science and her exploration of the universe’s mysteries. He then read aloud Howe's poem.

The Boston Globe interviews poet and Radcliffe Institute fellow Ross Gay about what he is reading now and why. Gay has been named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for his Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.

Ross Gay RI '16 was recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry for his collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. The Harvard Crimson had the chance to sit down with him and ask him about his most recent and upcoming work.

Peter Behrens with his wife, Basha Burwell, and their son, Henry Behrens. Photo by Jason Grow

In his three novels and two collections of short stories, Peter Behrens RI ’16 plumbs his family’s history in Canada, England, Germany, and Ireland. What drives him, however, is not what he knows about his family but what he doesn’t know: “The only way I know to learn what I don’t know is through fiction.”

During the Great Depression, a corner of 170th Street in New York City was known as the Bronx Slave Market, where household workers and other laborers would go each morning seeking day work. Make a Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York), 1938. Photo by Robert McNeill, Smithsomian American Art Museum

Domestic workers—many poor and working-class women of color—relied on history and storytelling to mobilize a movement to reform household labor.

“Slavery was not just a system of holding people in bondage, it was holding people in bondage for a purpose, and that was to make money, to make money off of their bodies, and that’s the important realization that Americans have to come to,” said Professor Annette Gordon-Reed at a recent Harvard panel discussion.

Radcliffe fellow Michael Pollan is exploring a budding rebirth of psychedelic drugs, all but banned since the 1960s. “This has been a different kind of reporting for me. Interviewing people with cancer diagnoses—who are thinking about death—and talking about death with them,” Pollan said.

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